I do believe that in biotech, you need to truly be motivated by improving lives.
It seemed to me that this article mentioned a few strategies that the GS report advised for to sustain revenue growth that could also tie in to making useful biotech products (e.g. finding a market that has a disease with high incidence).
That being said, this post title seems to be a tad bit sensationalized. Certainly an investment bank of this ilk would advise towards making profitable investments.
My experience has been many people who work in the biotech industry(albeit scientists,engineers, etc) want to help people.
Obviously, no company is going to function like a charity but perhaps not all companies are created equally?(when comparing a financial services firm with a biotech company).
What I said is not a very nuanced look I suppose, as biotech companies can do things like develop IP from publically funded research and often do things that can be anti-consumer interests.
The rules of markets are an emergent phenomenon based on human psychology. The government operates within those rules--it can create incentives and disincentives, but it cannot change the rules.
I don't see what is very extraordinary about this claim.
The idea of selling of goods predates any government. In their simplest form, how a market operates is determined by the agreement two people, a seller and a buyer for an exchange
When restrictions are applied, how the market operates is still determined by how people interact within those rules or by how they attempt to circumvent them to make their exchange.
I'm not sure how to feel about this. I don't have anything backing me up but I do expect there was a clear tribe structure in place before trading really kicked off.
Pharmaceutical markets don't exist without government-enforced patent monopolies. The entire market is state-created, so the state should probably regulate that market to maximize benefits to the citizens of that state.
Says Goldman Sachs the money men. Even if there's a prevention model, anomalies are inevitable and what if anomalies are frequent would simply just let those people die because of your profits?
If a company succeeds in eliminating or reducing a major illness (and its related family of illnesses) from world wide population then they should be rewarded with a one time cash bonus of what that illness could have cost the governments around the world for the next decade or so. Or some sort of formula like that.
One time incentives are always super attractive for employees and staff, although not so much for investors.
Yes which is a very good reason that medicine should be a public good as it in Canada and many European countries. The whole premise of for-profit medicine as this article points out is insane.
That's kind of the point of prices. One major factor you consider when setting a price is what's the alternative. If the alternative is 10 years of treatment at $x a year, then you can charge up to 10 * x. You can charge more for convenience of not having to do treatment maybe less to entice this as an alternative
On the flip side, however, I imagine it's a lot harder to convince some entity -- an individual, an insurer, a government -- to pay $1 million once vs. $100,000/year for 10 (or more) years. Whether due to psychology (the former might feel more expensive) or budgeting (the latter lets you spread out the cost), the problem remains. It's going to take a non-trivial amount of effort I think to get the American (and possibly other) healthcare system(s) ready for such a change.
On a personal level we tend to say "life is precious and I value it." or at least those are the virtues we attempt to signal.
When we act in concert through markets we tend to say "life is cheap and I don't really care that badly."
People always lament and say that the market gets it wrong but does it? Or is the truth about how we really feel just a little too horrifying uncomfortable?
I'm actively making a generalization about a behavioral pattern I see playing out among an aggregate of people with regards to what they say with their actions vs. what they say with their words.
"I" doesn't make sense in that context. I could change it to "people" but I don't think I'm excluded from the behavioral pattern, so "we" it is.
More the latter, but it’s a bit more nuanced: It’s more honest to say the each of us values a select few others (for me, maybe a dozen) and everyone else’s life I don’t value.
That's a fair comment. Though I would say it's not that you don't value those with a greater psychological distance from you it's that you value them in the abstract and it doesn't concretely translate to materially caring about them.
Suck how? Is the valuation different from that of most people?
I value the life of most people I don’t know at a few cents, looking at my past behaviour (buy the simplest of unnecessary things instead of donating to African child vaccination).
Part of this is because the vitriol poured out on Gilead over pricing. The cure had actually much cheaper lifetime costs than the treatment, but because the cost was upfront people complained. How much a society is willing to pay for stuff is a real indication of what it actually values. Society has shown that it does not value cures over treatments. You get what you pay for.
Key factor in a farms pitch deck I wrote years ago: this indication recurs, so patients who catch the disease will need subsequent treatment, but due to how it happens this doesn’t qualify as a chronic condition. (Which would have made the trials much more expensive).
There’s a bit of kabuki in pharma pitches: on one hand you have to talk about how you care about patient suffering, on the other hand you need to cosmetically sugar coat yet emphasize the revenue model, which is what people really care about.
(Oh and the best pitch decks always have gory pictures in them)
What about governments create a "bug bounty" program for diseases? Every year, the bounties for common diseases would increase, and if a firm finds a cure, it must accept the bounty and gives the cure to the human society, free of royalty
For fucks sake - it's Goldman Sachs people. When the market was going tits up in 2007/8 they royally shafted all of their own clients. If don't accept the stance that the whole operation is toxic then bye bye dinosaur. (But if you have a shit tonne of cash I recommend them).
(added note: I'm pure British (born in Zambia) any sarcasm is intentional and probably just for effect)
What if nations funded research and drug production in nation owned facilities that priced the drugs at production price to national insurances and at higher prices for world wide sale? The high costs of research in medicine should be canceled out by the reduction in insurance spending (which no instead would directly be used for research). Given that nowadays drug companies are profitable their spending and earnings must be balanced, so would it would be in such a system as well. The price for drugs can only go down this way. It would not even be necessary to get rid of commercial drug companies and the standing patents. It would just be an addition for the creation of drugs that do not need to rely on a business model but that are focused on actually make people healthy as cheaply as possible.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 97.3 ms ] threadThe idea of selling of goods predates any government. In their simplest form, how a market operates is determined by the agreement two people, a seller and a buyer for an exchange
When restrictions are applied, how the market operates is still determined by how people interact within those rules or by how they attempt to circumvent them to make their exchange.
This is not a unique case.
One time incentives are always super attractive for employees and staff, although not so much for investors.
Each country has to decide whether to shoulder the responsiblity of citizen health, or leave it to the market.
When we act in concert through markets we tend to say "life is cheap and I don't really care that badly."
People always lament and say that the market gets it wrong but does it? Or is the truth about how we really feel just a little too horrifying uncomfortable?
"I" doesn't make sense in that context. I could change it to "people" but I don't think I'm excluded from the behavioral pattern, so "we" it is.
I value the life of most people I don’t know at a few cents, looking at my past behaviour (buy the simplest of unnecessary things instead of donating to African child vaccination).
The Goldman Sachs analyst was really not that cold blooded
There’s a bit of kabuki in pharma pitches: on one hand you have to talk about how you care about patient suffering, on the other hand you need to cosmetically sugar coat yet emphasize the revenue model, which is what people really care about.
(Oh and the best pitch decks always have gory pictures in them)
However - how would you define a partial cure? Or reward improvements to a cure? A cancer drug that works 60% of the time? 80% of the time? Etc.